Sen. Rand Paul, a first-term Kentucky Republican who is a physician, spoke about times he looked “into the eyes of one-pound babies … cradled their small bodies in the palm of one hand.”

“I believe that great nations and great civilizations spring from a people who have a moral compass,” Paul said. “Our nation is adrift, adrift in a wilderness where right and wrong have become subservient to a hedonism of the moment. I believe our country is in need of a revival.”

As Captain Renault would say, I’m shocked, SHOCKED, to find that voter fraud is going on here! Our illustrious Governor Gregoire remains in office, despite winning reelection through a fraudulent recount that included thousands of felons and dead people voting for her. Of course, since she’s a Democrat, the media covers her ass and the state GOP has zero power to do anything about it, so to be a Democrat here basically means no competition at all.

As for the automatic ballot mailing, that’s the first I’ve heard of it, but it doesn’t surprise me. All voting in the state is done by mail, they don’t even have voting booths. The idea being that it saves on election costs, and it’s easier for homebound people to vote by mail. But it also means there’s more opportunity to take advantage of the system through voter fraud.

I had good homemade Mexican (pollo en mole) made by a lovely woman raised in Mexico whom I visited over the MLK weekend and who lives in South Texas (about 20 minutes from Brownsville). … Mmmm … tasty … And she’s a lovely, lovely woman … more on that later …

I’m partial to Peruvian aji sauce on my pollo. Do you have a La Granja restaurant out there? $5 for a quarter chicken, black beans, rice, a soft drink, all the aji sauce you can shake a drumstick at, and an INS nightmare in the kitchen.

I arrived in SoCal last evening and found the Suns and Sunettes were working, so I went to see Les Misérables. Someone here said to bring lots of Kleenex, Kit I think. He was right. It was a gully washer. I was grateful for the comic relief from Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen which allowed me to reclaim my composure.

He borrows from the Hollande quote and says “We must not become the party of austerity. We must be the party of growth” but means a very different thing. Throughout the speech he points out that by making it about bigger vs. smaller governement we remain focused on the idea of government as a central part of society. In other words, we fight on the Dems’ turf.
“We have fallen into a trap of believing that the world revolves around Washington, and that the economy is based there. If we keep believing that, government will grow so big that it will take us all down with it.”

I like this: “The Democrats promise to be the party of “more from government,” but they are actually the party of less. They are the party of economic contraction, austerity and less from the economy. The Republican Party is the party of “more,” the party that creates “more from the economy.””

And this:

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So you ask, what does that future look like? How do we win this argument?

For starters, we have to recalibrate the compass of conservatism. Now, I’ve been very clear. We don’t need to change what we believe as conservatives – our principles are timeless.

But we do need to re-orient our focus to the place where conservatism thrives – in the real world beyond the Washington Beltway. We must lay out the contrast between liberalism’s top-down government solutions and our Bottom-Up real world philosophy.

I don’t think that is a start. ITs a great point to bring up but it must start even deeper.

Policies must grow priniples that are well-articulated.

I feel like I’m beating a dead horse but Reagan knew how, and its not hard. Lawyers, teachers, etc. do it very well. Take big ideas and make them digestible.

“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”